Pivotal Tuesdays
Page 21
On the day he turned thirty-two, the maverick Perot founded his own high-tech startup, Electronic Data Systems (EDS). Most of the big money to be made those days by computer companies that weren’t IBM came through government contracts, and at first the company went nowhere. Then Perot got hugely lucky. Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law in 1965. These huge government health care programs required big data management and the kind of sophisticated computer systems that Perot’s company could provide. He won prime contracts to service Texas Medicare and Medicaid claims; then Governor Ronald Reagan awarded him California’s. Along the way, EDS faced charges of perpetuating an East-Texas-style racial order, firing and demoting black workers. EDS went public in 1968, turning Perot into what the leftist magazine Ramparts called the first “welfare billionaire.”6
As his wealth and reputation grew, Perot turned himself into a folksy, down-home business hero who mixed populist plain-talk with corporate aphorisms. Despite government having made him rich, he cultivated a persona built around the triumph of free-market capitalism, about a little-guy entrepreneur who used his smarts and pluck to compete with corporate giants.7
Perot ardently believed that private businessmen like him were better equipped than the government to solve America’s problems, and he made a number of audacious ventures in the 1970s and 80s that played this out. The first was orchestrating the successful rescue of two EDS employees jailed in Iran shortly after the Islamic Revolution. Next, he tried to push for the return of American POWs in Vietnam, and offered unsolicited advice to the Carter administration in their quest to free the U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran. He funneled money to the secret Iran-Contra operation headed by Lt. Col. Oliver North. Single-minded and hot-headed, Perot became frustrated that people in power never paid as much attention to his advice as he thought they should. Many considered his efforts mere publicity stunts; Perot knew he was fighting to make things better. In the meantime, he had become “America’s most intriguing—and most publicized—businessman.”8
Perot spent a good thirty years building this legend before he ran for president, and the mythos served him well, particularly for voters comparing him to his fellow Texan, George H.W. Bush. Positioning his quest for the presidency as a pure grassroots campaign, called upon by the “everyday folks” who were “writing me in longhand” to urge him to run. “I don’t want to fail them.” Even though he had neither government experience nor a particularly clear policy platform, Perot’s populism struck a nerve. “George Bush is a good ol’ boy from Texas who made a lot of money in oil and has lost touch,” said 43-year-old Marilyn Johnson. “I suppose Mr. Perot may be a good ol’ boy, but he went out and made his own money, started from nothing. God bless him. Bush was born into money.”9
The response to Perot reflected the deep disillusionment with party politics and big institutions of all kinds in 1992 America, the upending of political truisms that made robber barons into the populist heroes. While not entirely spontaneous or truly bottom-up—Perot seeded the idea and used his considerable fortune to bankroll statewide operations—the engagement of a wide array of ordinary people in Perot’s campaign made it a third-party campaign like no other. Theodore Roosevelt had run as a third party candidate after two terms as president and with the support of powerful business and intellectual leaders. George Wallace had been a four-term governor and gained his strength from the disaffection of Southern whites with the Democrats’ support of civil rights. Third party candidates in other years had championed single issues, interest groups, or regions. Perot drew support from men and women, working-class and middle-class, North, South, East, and West. The only thing his supporters had in common—aside from their disdain for the major-party offerings—was that the vast majority of them were white.10
These voters disliked the mainstream press nearly as much as they disliked mainstream politicians, and CNN became the “alternative” place both for Perot to deliver his message and for his candidacy to be endlessly analyzed and dissected. “What Perot did,” commented conservative journalist Mona Charen on another CNN program later that spring, “is he absolutely leapfrogged [over] the major media.” Noted a more liberal CNN talking head a few days later, “everybody thinks that [Perot] agrees with them. Moderates think he’s moderate; liberals think he’s liberal; conservatives think he’s conservative.”11
Third-party candidates in earlier elections didn’t have CNN. They didn’t have a way to get their message directly to the voters, and a way to control the news cycle. But they also didn’t have to weather the scrutiny Perot—and all his fellow candidates—faced in the cable-news age.
The Spin Cycle
With 24 hours to fill, CNN provided airtime to people and stories that the others didn’t have time to cover. And with 24 hours to fill, it was able to dig deeper into all aspects of the people running for president, including their personal lives. Over the course of many decades, changing media technologies and political communications made the relationship between candidate and voter more personal. From Wilson’s limericks to FDR’s fireside chats to Nixon’s polished television commercials, candidates and presidents carefully crafted their “personal side” to win votes and cement political loyalties.
After Vietnam and Watergate, voters realized that behind this friendly, paternal façade national leaders had dirty secrets: waging war, building “enemies lists,” breaking into rival campaign headquarters, covering it up. The press seemed complicit in the cover-ups, failing to ask the hard questions and looking the other way when leaders behaved badly. Although the nineteenth-century press hadn’t hesitated to dive deep into presidents’ sexual sins, the twentieth-century D.C. press corps kept what they knew about extramarital dalliances to themselves.12
After Watergate, the press never again wanted to be caught flat-footed. Their swing toward investigative journalism occurred simultaneously with the rise of a sex-saturated and celebrity-driven pop culture. Youth culture, gay liberation, and feminism had brought discussions of sex out of the bedroom and into the public realm; at the same time, television and magazine outlets chronicling the lives of the rich, beautiful, and famous proliferated. Popular culture celebrated the rebels and the rule-breakers, from the bikers of Easy Rider to punk rockers and the frustrated news anchor in the satirical film Network who yelled, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”13
Politicians moved from being genial father figures to being living and breathing personalities, full of flaws and peccadillos. Relentless investigations into all dimensions of candidates’ lives—from the cereal they ate for breakfast to the women they dated at night—became an integral part of presidential campaigns. In 1988, Gary Hart’s presidential campaign received a fatal blow after a tabloid published photos of the married candidate enjoying the close company of a lovely blonde named Donna Rice. The Hart-Rice scandal got news outlets of every sort involved in the pursuit of political scandal. Political reporting was no longer the purview of the inside-the-Beltway establishment.
The rise of cable television intensified this hothouse environment. Many channels competed for viewers’ attention, and this further privileged the sensational and salacious over the staid and serious. Reporters now had multiple deadlines per day, and multiple stories to follow. The result was the reporters had less time to work on long-term investigative reporting that involved a lot of research. Cable technology also contributed to a regulatory change that had a profound effect on balanced, informed journalistic debate on television. For years, the Federal Communications Commission had required television networks to present multiple views on controversial issues; if a station gave one side time to air its positions, it was required to give equal time to the opposing side. This “fairness doctrine” not only kept television news generally impartial but also kept the lid on the more outrageous strains of argument. If you were going to go on the attack, you needed to base it on facts that could withstand rebuttal.
In 1987, the Reagan-era
FCC abolished this rule, responding in good part to arguments by conservatives that the mainstream press had a liberal bias. One of the most vocal supporters of the change was former Nixon aide Roger Ailes, who had long understood the power of cable television to reach new audiences and shift political conversations. Now, Ailes and his fellow conservatives could launch news programs of their own. The birth of Ailes’s Fox News happened four years after the 1992 election, but the repercussions of the end of the fairness doctrine were already being felt in the early 1990s. Not only could journalists go on television telling one side of an issue, but campaign operatives also could go on air and repeat their messages again and again, without having rivals there to challenge them.14 As one Clinton campaign advisor put it, the press is “just a giant monster that has … to be continually fed. Either you feed it or it feeds on you.”15
The Democratic primaries showed just how powerful that giant monster could be. In late 1991, there were six declared candidates, but a great many Democrats were waiting for someone better to come along. Many of them pinned their hopes on Mario Cuomo, governor of New York. Cuomo was an unapologetic liberal with a common touch, cerebral and deft with the press, with the character and gravitas needed to run for president. He’d already made a run for the nomination in 1988, and his support and organization were even stronger four years later. He was charismatic, with an extraordinary ability to deliver mesmerizing speeches that rallied the party faithful in ways few other politicians could. Cuomo was big-time. Clinton and the rest of them were small-time.
For months, Cuomo had been sending signals about possibly running again. Yet he just wouldn’t come out one way or another. His indecision gave him the nickname “Hamlet on the Hudson.” As the fall months went by, Bush’s approval ratings started dropping. When polls were taken about preferences for Democratic candidates, Cuomo came out ahead of the men already in the race. Even though he would have a late start, it seemed he had an opportunity to become the front-runner if he got himself on the ballot in the first primary state, New Hampshire.16
The deadline for filing for candidacy in that primary was December 20. And as luck would have it, right at that moment Cuomo was in final intense negotiations with the state legislature over the New York State budget. New York Republicans seized the opportunity to blast Cuomo over putting his political ambitions over the interests of his constituents. Cuomo deeply disliked the accusation; as he later recalled, “I felt, ‘The state’s in trouble—this is no time to leave.’” By the end of December 19, there was still no budget deal. And New Hampshire law required Cuomo to file for candidacy in person.
Reporters descended on Albany. CNN set up cameras on the tarmac at the airport, keeping watch on the plane Cuomo had chartered to fly himself to Manchester to file. The story dominated CNN all day. The hours ticked by. No budget deal. No Cuomo on the plane. At 3:30 P.M., Cuomo made a public statement. The budget had to take priority over his presidential ambitions. He was out. “If I had left for New Hampshire without a budget,” Cuomo reflected, “just imagine what the media would have done. And they would have been right.… It would have been hopeless for me.”17
The remaining candidates on the Democratic side soon learned the hazards of running for president in the age of the 24-news cycle. By January 1992, the race for New Hampshire was in full gear. Cuomo’s departure had focused fresh attention on Bill Clinton, the up-and-coming Southerner. Unlike the other moderates in the race, he was from outside the Beltway. Unlike the other governors, he was a moderate. “Clinton is certainly no conservative, but he is a pragmatic middle-roader of the kind that won Democratic nominations in the pre-McGovern era,” noted the eminent political reporters Rowland Evans and Robert Novak. “He is in step with the party’s comers in Congress—typified by senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut and Richard Shelby of Alabama—who disdain ideology.” Meanwhile, the other Democratic campaigns sputtered. Tom Harkin took a two-week Caribbean vacation. Bob Kerrey had trouble raising money and had a revolt of his top campaign staff.18
It was too good to last. In mid-January, the Star supermarket tabloid published a bombshell, telling the story of an Arkansas jazz singer and newscaster named Gennifer Flowers and her longtime affair with Bill Clinton. In Arkansas in the 1980s, rumors about Clinton’s personal life were so common people didn’t really pay a great deal of attention to them. They were rumors, and the people who supported Clinton didn’t care too much about them. The people who cared didn’t vote for him anyway. Nothing made its way into the local press. As he moved onto a national stage, Clinton continued to be surrounded with rumblings about his alleged affairs—the campaign staff called them “bimbo eruptions”—but nothing stuck.19
Now, the national media machine went into overdrive. Already deft at rapid response, the campaign came out swinging, telling reporters that Flowers’s story was a lie. Bill and Hillary went in front of millions of television views of CBS’s 60 Minutes to talk about the strength of their marriage. Flowers and the Star countered with a press conference at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel the next day. She played tapes of her phone calls with Clinton, including an excerpt where he encouraged her to deny their relationship if asked by curious reporters.
Like many stories in politics, the scandal became powerful because it substantiated a narrative that was emerging about Bill Clinton—not just about his sexual habits, but about his broader “character.” One political wag in Arkansas had once called him “Slick Willie.” The name stuck, because it fit an image of a candidate who would say anything to get elected, and who played fast and loose with the truth.20
The Flowers incident also was a powerful media moment because of the intersection between tabloid journalism and straight journalism never before seen in presidential politics. Gennifer Flowers went public because the Star reportedly paid her $100,000 for her story. She fielded questions from reporters from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times—as well as from a sidekick on the profane and sensational radio show of “shock jock” Howard Stern.
Clinton was still reeling from the Flowers debacle when another scandal hit. This time, it wasn’t sex but the Vietnam draft. Clinton was among the first of the Vietnam generation to run for president, and like many men his age had worked hard to avoid being drafted. His lack of military service during the war already was a tricky element of his biography, but Clinton had assured everyone he hadn’t pulled any strings; he was no draft dodger. But as the tough New Hampshire primary campaign came down to its final days, it became clear Clinton had “pulled strings” to obtain a coveted berth in the University of Arkansas ROTC program—and, making matters worse, had reneged on his commitment when the next draft lottery gave him a number that made it unlikely he would be sent to Vietnam. Once again, here was a story feeding the narrative that Clinton was a candidate who might not be trusted. To make it worse, his Democratic rival Kerrey was a war hero who had lost a leg in Vietnam.
The pundits said it was over for Clinton. They underestimated him. They also underestimated the audacity of the Clinton campaign spin machine. It included two tough political consultants, Paul Begala and James Carville, and a cool but equally tough thirty-year-old communications director named George Stephanopoulos. DLC policy chief Bruce Reed had come from Washington to run the policy shop. Campaign pollster Stan Greenberg provided relentless slice-and-dice opinion surveys and focus-group data that gave the campaign a daily sense of where their candidate stood in the pack.
Many around Clinton belonged to a breed of political professionals unknown before the television age, who made working on campaigns into a full-time career. Many had worked for Michael Dukakis in 1988, and had learned some tough lessons. When Republican strategist Lee Atwater hammered away, the Dukakis campaign had been slow to fight back. Four years later, these operatives learned that rapid response and message discipline were critical to winning modern presidential elections. The candidate had to take control of the story and of the spin cycle.
To halt th
e draft story, the campaign released a 1969 letter from Clinton to the ROTC commander that was damning in its admission of guilt. “Thank you for saving me from the draft,” the twenty-three-year-old wrote with palpable relief. But the forty-five-year-old candidate was able to contextualize these words with his own message. It didn’t end the story, but it slowed it down enough for the campaign to keep its traction. Clinton came in second in New Hampshire, behind Paul Tsongas. His campaign advisors had the audacity to spin it not as a loss, but as a win—calling Clinton the “Comeback Kid.”21
It remained a tough battle. Kerrey fell away, but the sober and uncharismatic Tsongas gained momentum. Jerry Brown ran an anti-establishment campaign that proved remarkably resilient. “Character” remained a recurring issue, as baby boomer Clinton had to fend off stories about his past never faced by leaders of the World War II generation, like Bush. Stories swirled about his smoking marijuana while in graduate school. He acknowledged it, but countered that he had “never inhaled.” The campaign tried to spin the story another way, and fed the media beast with stories of their own. “We were winning ugly,” observed Stephanopoulos later. “Every week we’d snuff out an incipient scandal, grind out a majority, and watch Clinton grow more unpopular.”22
The Democratic field as a whole was not doing well. Clinton as well as the other candidates consistently ran third in national polls, behind both Bush and Perot. Many Democratic primary voters told pollsters they’d rather vote for the maverick Texas businessman. Over at Bush reelection headquarters, campaign manager Fred Malek was pleased at the disorderly Democrats. “The clear message of the Democratic race is that the voters are not satisfied with any of the Democratic candidates in the field,” he told a reporter. Clinton was furious: at his rivals, at Perot, at the press. “They have not captured the essence of my economic message,” he thundered to his aides.23